As one of the main creators
of the 6-month product cycles our gaming graphics card industry currently operates
on, NVIDIA sort of owes it to everyone to produce both cost effective and extremely
high performance parts. If they expect us to keep on adjusting to new $300
graphics accelerators being released every 6 months they should also be obligated
to provide a solution in the $100 - $150 range that doesn’t perform like most
other “value” graphics cards.

While their current flagship
product, the GeForce2 GTS, is receiving much more competition than the original
GeForce ever did in terms of performance, it is safe to say that NVIDIA is still
sitting pretty. With a very popular high end part such as the Quadro (as well
as a couple of successors to that due out shortly) and a very solid product
in the GeForce2 GTS for the performance desktop segment, it was only a matter
of time before NVIDIA attempted to completely dominate the market with a cost
effective entry as well.

Not too long ago we discovered
that AMD’s Duron has restored meaning to the axiom “cheap doesn’t have to mean
slow” and now NVIDIA is attempting to continue that recent tradition with the
release of the GeForce2 MX, what we’ve been calling the NV11 for the past few
months.